Throughout this module, I have been met with many challenges that have not been present in previous modules. For example, the whole module was based on me finding my own briefs, so my success was based entirely on how much work I can handle and my motivation throughout. Competitions are fairly easy to come across but finding clients can be difficult and in retrospect, I do feel that I could have reached out to more people or used the social media pages/identity I have been developing in OUIL502 to advertise my skills.
Although I did complete a good handful of briefs, I do feel that as I put this module to the back of my mind for the first few months, I missed out on more opportunities to produce work.
Responding to briefs outside of this course has been insightful and has definitely made me think about how I am going to find work once I am out of education. Having the opportunity to select briefs within an area I am interested in has definitely been useful in regards to my practice. Most of the briefs I chose to respond to were very pattern or packaging based – which surprised me because I thought I would enjoy briefs that were more story-book related. Out of all the briefs I responded to, the YCN Pan Macmillan competition was my least favourite. I think this was due to the fact that it was dragged out for a long period of time and I really lost the momentum. However, looking back over the development work for this competition, I think it actually benefitted from the breaks because I returned to it with a fresh mind.
Submitting work to competitions without going through the process of a formal peer feedback session meant that I had to be much more critical of what I’d done throughout the process. If I was unsure about anything, then I had to actively go and ask people for feedback. I think the removal of the feedback sessions (for competition briefs other than the initial YCN ones), really pushed me to be more independent with my work and is great preparation for dealing with work outside of education.
Managing my time effectively in accordance to deadlines for other modules and live briefs was sometimes a little overwhelming. However, I find that having large workloads makes me use my time more productively so I don’t think my work suffered in that respect. What I do regret however, is not looking out for competitions daily. There were a couple of instances where I discovered a competition with only a few hours left to enter, so my designs ended up being slightly rushed and unsatisfying.
The ability to break down a brief to find out what it is really asking for, the audience, context and whether or not it is relevant to your discipline is really important because it often makes them a little less daunting and encourages you to get started. I found that the exercises we did to break down the initial YCN briefs were a really useful way of getting started on a brief. I often found that a lot of briefs were sometimes unnecessarily wordy which either made them seem uninteresting or intimidating. I think this will be useful when I am dealing with clients because it will give me guidance on which questions I need to ask them if they don’t make specific areas clear or if they don’t really know what they want.
As I feel I have learnt so much from this module, I don’t regret the decisions I made when it came to balancing out my workload. However, if I were to do it again, then I would have definitely tried to pick up more briefs and perhaps a wider variety. Not necessarily because I don’t feel that I have done enough, but because I would have liked to try responding to briefs based in areas I haven’t yet explored. I think that the briefs I selected were within my comfort zone – I had either worked within that area of illustration before or I was keen to try it out. This was not necessarily a bad thing though, because it really confirmed my points of interests and where I feel my work fits within the design industry.
